950 AI agents spent 21 hours hunting through DNA and found something no one had noticed
Key Points
- Around 950 Claude agents searched DNA data for 21 hours
- Agents screened over 200,000 enzymes and 3,500 candidate systems
- They found ART, a CRISPR-like system in bacteria-infecting viruses
- ART's function remains unknown and lab tests are ongoing
- Anthropic launched a new Bay Area life sciences lab
Anthropic said its Claude AI agents found a previously unknown enzyme system in viral DNA after a 21-hour search.
The company announced the find alongside the launch of a new life sciences research group and laboratory, which will use Claude for fundamental biology research.
Roughly 950 Claude agents combed through a large database of DNA sequences for 21 hours, using 210 million tokens in the process.
Anthropic said its scientists supplied only the initial prompt and the lab work, while the agents used their own judgement to choose which candidates to investigate.
The agents gathered more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases, enzymes that copy RNA into DNA, and picked out 3,500 new candidate systems.
They then narrowed those candidates down to the 20 most compelling and wrote a human-readable report on each one.
Anthropic said this type of analysis can take an expert scientist weeks to months of work.
A CRISPR-like pattern
One agent spotted a repeating pattern of DNA sequences sitting next to the gene for an unusual reverse transcriptase.
“(The DNA next to the RT) is spectacular: I can see by eye a tandem repeat array … that’s a CRISPR-like … repeat array?!” wrote the Claude agent, according to Anthropic.
The agent then counted the repeats, measured their spacing, compared the layout with known systems and searched the scientific literature for earlier reports of the pattern.
Anthropic named the system array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ART, and found it mainly in bacteriophages, the viruses that infect bacteria.
ART has three parts: the reverse transcriptase, a partner gene of unknown function beside it, and a long array of evenly spaced DNA repeats.
Earlier studies had already identified the underlying enzyme in a jumbo phage, but Anthropic said Claude appears to be the first to notice the repeat array and the accessory protein.
The repeat layout resembles a CRISPR array, the feature that makes CRISPR gene-editing tools programmable.
Anthropic said its first experiments show the ART array produces a set of distinct short RNAs, which suggests a similar mechanism may be at work.
The company said the combination of features in ART has only appeared together in a handful of other systems, all of which can cut, copy or paste DNA.
Anthropic does not yet know what ART does, and said further experiments to establish its function are underway.
“This is an exciting example of how AI agents can contribute to biological discovery,” said Feng Zhang, professor at MIT and the Broad Institute and one of the pioneers of CRISPR genome editing.
“The identification of RNA-repeat arrays associated with reverse transcriptases is genuinely intriguing and merits further investigation,” Zhang added.
The lab
Anthropic’s lab sits in the Bay Area and only handles work at biosafety levels 1 and 2, with no pathogens that can infect humans.
Human scientists perform all of the lab work, while Claude helps them interpret the data.
The team works in Claude Science and Claude Code, and sometimes uses its own harness to run many Claude sessions in parallel.
Anthropic has published a pre-print with more detail on ART and invited other scientists to submit research proposals.
